Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.

My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.

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Product of the Week:‍

Last week we covered an innovative hardware product to deter car break-ins, this week we’re back at it with another hardware company led by Akshita Iyer. This company is called Ome. Ome upgrades your kitchen starting with the most vulnerable and dangerous areas - the stove. More specifically the stove knob. Ome Kitchens smart knobs connect to your mobile app so you have full control of the stove, even when you’re not in the kitchen. Akshita turned down $800k from the Shark Tank judges,  a product and name iteration before their current offering today. From the sounds of it, product is being developed and stoves are getting smarter and safer. Give Ome Kitchen a look.  

Another product of the week is called BackSpace run by serial entrepreneur, Faiz Imran. After successfully building a marketing agency and working with dozens of influencers and builders of online communities, he saw and felt the acute pain that brand builders and community galvanizers face which is monetizing their community. For example, let’s say you’re a fitness influencer through Instagram and Tik Tok and want to engage deeper and deliver differentiated product offerings throughout the community experience. Enter BackSpace where communities around people and products can engage through live chat, premium community levels, and simple mechanisms to up sell and cross sell passionate consumers. If you or any of your friends have built substantial communities online, check out BackSpace.

Companies Worth Applying To:

This week the company worth applying to is called Itential as they are looking for a Senior Accountant. This would be a great opportunity to work with a software company from a finance perspective and get great experience a level or two under C-level leadership. Ian Bresenhan, is the CEO of Itential and they make it simple for businesses to navigate a dual network ecosystem into one. What does that mean? Over the past few decades companies have built their businesses on physical or on-premise networks. Then the cloud came along. Now, how does a business who has some networks on prem and some networks in the cloud co-exist, coordinate data, and seamlessly operate. Welcome to Itential. They are hiring for several roles.

Events to Put on the Calendar:

Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurs Meetup is on Wednesday, October 5th with Atlanta Ventures Partner A.T. Gimbel who will be interviewing Ascend Medical CEO, Jason Madsen. The topic of conversations will be around the lessons and learnings Jason experienced co-founding WellStreet Medical and now running Ascend Medical which brings the doctor’s office to you. Ranging from telemedicine to home visits to mobile testing, Ascend is reimagining the healthcare experience starting with location.

Beta Product of the Week:

This company is truly laying brick by brick and producing a strong foundation and that company is called ToolPath. Andy Powell, co-Founder of Atlanta success story CallRail, is on to his next company which is focused on manufacturing technology. ToolPath is making it easier to create CNC machined parts — from prototyping to mass production, and they are doing this by building cloud-based CAM software to automatically create g-code programs for CNC machines. Let’s elaborate on those hieroglyphics.  

CNC machining is a procedure used in most manufacturing operations. CNC stands for Computer Numeric Control and deals with the use of a single-setup or more computer to administer actions of different machine tools and in ToolPath’s case, specifically mills for now. And CAM stands for computer aided software. So now with ToolPath, the opportunity for CNC just moved from the horse and buggy to a car because the software brings accessibility and convenience to the CNC market. Keep tabs on ToolPath and go to their website for an early look.  

Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.

Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!

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Resources discussed in this episode:

Product of the Week:

Ome Kitchen

BackSpace

Companies Worth Applying To:

Itential

Rolls Open

Events to Put on your Calendar:

Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurship Meetup

Beta Product of the Week:

ToolPath